Roslyn

Released

Witcyst is one of the most unpredictable and productive underground artists from New Zealand. Based in Whangarei, in the Northland region of the North Island, he’s wildly prolific, with over 1000 albums to his name, many still available for download via his LifeSpace label blog. In the nineties he released a number of cassettes and lathe-cut records, but Roslyn was his only full-length CD at the time, and it’s as good an entry point as any, made up of a flood of distorted, overloaded miniatures, often for guitar and voice – there’s a rough folksiness to some of them that might remind you of the weirder Sentridoh albums, but Witcyst’s music is way more surreal and far-ranging than that. If he’s focused more on these snapshots of anti-melody throughout Roslyn, there’s much more to explore throughout his dense back catalogue, including some choice collaborations with underground lifers like John Olson (of Wolf Eyes) or Prick Decay.

Jon Dale